Steve Jobs Isn't Accurate, But That's Not the Problem

In many ways, Steve Jobs is a well-made movie with good performances from Michael Fassbender and a stellar supporting cast. But I found myself wanting more.

I saw Steve Jobs over the weekend and came away disappointed. I already knew going in that it wasn't going to be completely accurate, but as a fan of Aaron Sorkin back to Sports Night and The West Wing, I expected the witty, rapid-fire dialogue to be entertaining and in many ways, it was. It's a well-made movie with a good performance from Michael Fassbender as Jobs and a stellar supporting cast. But I found myself wanting more.

Again, it didn't surprise me that the movie played more than a little loose with the facts of Jobs' life. While there has been some disagreement about the tone of the Walter Isaacson biography on which the movie is loosely based, no one has suggested it got the basic facts wrong. But lots of people I'm acquainted with who knew the real Steve Jobs better than I did have pointed out many important things in the movie that aren't accurate.

I didn't expect that to bother me much. The movie was always presented as historical fiction not as a documentary, and almost all such films take some liberties with the truth to dramatize certain moments. I know people who really were disappointed in Selma and The Imitation Game for such inaccuracies, but I found them to be entertaining and important movies nevertheless.

In Steve Jobs, some of the issues were inevitable given the structure. The movie is set backstage before the introductions of the Macintosh, Next, and iMac, which is very theatrical, but few of those conversations would have happened in those settings if they happened at all. Some things that might have been mentioned, such as Jobs' wife and family, are not discussed at all.

Perhaps most importantly, there's little acknowledgement of the work that actually goes into creating products like the Mac or the Next computer. There's a minute or two about the dimensions of the NeXTcube and another where Jobs is hounding engineers to pick the right picture for the demo, but almost nothing about the hard choices that really went into making the machines about to be introduced. Now I know that the process is hard to film and can be dull but it isn't impossible. Halt & Catch Fire does a good job of it on the small screen. It's something Sorkin also had issue with in The Social Network.

But maybe it's that I met the real Jobs on a number of occasions and Fassbender's depiction just didn't seem real to me. It's a sentiment echoed by other tech journalists such as Walt Mossberg and Larry Magid. The self-involved jerk of the movie is not balanced with how the real Jobs, who could be a jerk, could also be incredibly charismatic and inspire incredible loyalty in the people who worked for him. I never believed that the other people in the movie would want to work for Fassbender's Jobs at all, much less do what was the best work of their lives for him.

The reason that this is important is that Jobs did more than fight with people, put on great presentations, and make a lot of money – he helped usher in the era of the personal computer. He and Wozniak – and for that matter, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Nolan Bushnell, Ed Roberts, Doug Englebart , Alan Kay, Don Estridge, Dennis Ritchie, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, Larry Ellison, Hasso Plattner, and many others transformed the way we live, learn, run our businesses, and connect to each other. Their impact on society is often underestimated. They likely had more influence on the world in the past 40 years than all the politicians, diplomats, and warriors put together. The process it took to create these changes is a largely unknown story and while Steve Jobs had a chance to tell part of it, it never really does. And it's that lost chance rather than any factual error that is the real disappointment.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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